nokia

When you are experimenting with those time lapse tricks you might want a tip on how to mount your phone. I solved it with some aluminum foil. It can be easily formed to fit any surface and hold any phone. Simple as that. Just make sure you don’t short cut any of the connections at the bottom of your phone.

The people that are lucky enough to run around with iPhones in their pockets probably wonder what to do with their old phones. Here is a suggestion. Regular readers will know that I like photographic experiments. So first, the ones that just retired their Nokia N95. It has built in time lapse photography. Something called “sequence mode”. Simply choose what kind of sequence you want, click the trigger and let the camera snap an image at the selected interval.

I did an experiment and placed my N95 in the window of my car while out driving. It happily snapped an image every 10th second. Giving a stop motion movie of my short ride.

The problem with proper time lapse photography is the fact that it takes time. I am not the happy owner of an iPhone, so I can’t just place my N95 in a window for a couple of weeks. So I decided to put my old and trusted Nokia 6630 into duty. You know, the phone that survived the 20 meter drop. It has no proper time lapse function built in. A little searching around the net and I found a solution. One involving a Java application and one involving a Python script. I decided to try the last one.

First you install Python on your phone. That involves installation of two applications. You find them here. You need the versions that are right for your phone. For my 6630 these are the files I installed:

Before you install it on your phone you need to remove the “.txt”-extension and replace it so the file name ends with “.py” and only “.py”. In other words, the file you send to your phone should be named “6630Timelapse.py”.

Before you run it you also need to make a folder on the memory card of your phone. Use the built in file manager and make the following structure: Memory Card (e:): python/timelapse/

Your images will be stored there.

Then you start Python and select “Run Script” from the menu. Give the project a name, decide a number of images and an interval. Note about the interval, choosing anything less than 5 seconds might cause problems. The phone needs some time to store the image on the memory card.

Time to test it. I simply put it outside our window facing the sky. Snapping an image every 15th second during the evening until the sky went dark. My experiments indicates that the phone can snap about 500 or 600 images on one charge. Of course depending on the time interval. If you connect a charger you could leave it until the memory card is full.

I’ll bring that phone when travelling. Leave it in my hotel room to document the cleaning process. Leave it on stage while speaking, to document how many people left during my presentation… Endless possibilities.

First, if you don’t use gmail you should really consider starting. It’s the best web based mail this planet has seen so far. On my computer at home I don’t use anything else. I didn’t even bother to install Outlook or anything similar the last time I cleaned up the box.

If you need an invite send me an email to eirikso at gmail dot com. The 50 first will get one. Or, simply google “gmail invite”…

So, you’re using gmail and you have a Symbian phone. Like the Nokia N80 or N73 one of the 300 supported java enabeled phones. And you want a nice interface for your gmail account. Then simply point the browser in your phone to “gmail.com/app” and install.

A very nice application to read your gmail on the phone. Only one (big) disappointment so far: you can’t attach anything when you send mails from this client. This is something that Google needs to fix!

A quick note: the phone in the picture is a Nokia N80. The picture itself is taken with my Nokia N73. Click the image to see the high resolution version.

I just did a very quick image quality comparison between the Nokia N80 (left picture) and the Nokia N73 (right picture). Snapped one picture with each camera. Under quite poor conditions. Both are 3 megapixels.

For me it seems like the two biggest differences in addition to the form factor on these two phones are better image quality but no WLAN on the N73.

So what do you want – WLAN or high quality images? As usual, we want both. Good camera and WLAN…